FILM Linenhall to screen The Skin I Live In

FACE OFF Antonio Banderas and Elena Anaya star in ‘The Skin I Live in’.

A skin crawler without the screams


Ciara Moynihan

Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s most recent offering, first released in May last year, is a heady brew of macabre suspense, horror and comedy. ‘The Skin I Live in’ (La Piel Que Habito) has drawn comparisons to the work of David Lynch and David Cronenberg, as well as Hitchcock.
This stomach-churningly dark film about obsession sees the return of Antonio Banderas to Almodóvar’s repertory company after a hiatus of 21 years. Banderas plays wealthy and brilliant surgeon Robert Ledgard, whose wife has died as a result of horrific burns caused by a tragic car crash. The surgeon has since developed an artificial durable skin that is resistant to burns and insect bites, which he says he’s been testing on mice. However, at his palatial estate, which also serves as a facility for medical research and an operating theatre, there are no mice. The scene for a body horror is thus set.
Ledgard appears to be holding a young woman named Vera (played by Elena Anaya) captive, using a dumbwaiter to provide her with supplies and monitoring her via closed-circuit television. We soon learn that Vera is the real subject of the surgeon’s cosmetic experiments. She is the human guinea pig. Although captive, Vera seems to consent to the the situation, and she and Ledgard seem to be in love in a Stockholm-syndrome sort of way.
Through flash-back scenes to years earlier, and through the revelations of Ledgard’s elderly servant, we discover the truth about Vera, about the death of Ledgard’s wife and about their daughter, Norma, who was committed to a psychiatric unit.
The tangled, twisted tale of this body horror comedy (a genre for which Pedro Almodóvar is famed) is not for the fainthearted. There is plenty of violence, both physical and sexual, and the storyline is decidedly grotesque.
Banderas delivers an intensely controlled performance, at once chilling and charming, reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Cary Grant. The cinematography creates a textured tableau in which colour plays a huge role. The predominant hue is (surprise, surprise) red, but all the colours sway and ooze creating a sickly atmosphere. 
Not all critics have been enamoured with ‘The Skin I Live in’, with some bemoaning its lack of emotion. Certainly this is no romantically charged, warm-and-fuzzy horror (yes, a contradiction in terms, but Almodóvar somehow pulls it off in his earlier film ‘Volver’), but the lack of emotion is central: It is the nexus on which the film’s horror turns – the cold sterility of the operating theatre, the displacement of love for psychopathic, twisted obsession.
Don’t expect a fast-paced slasher that will have you jumping out of your chair, however. As the director himself says, this is ‘a horror without screams or frights’. Just plenty of knives and bizarre twists.  

The Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar will screen ‘The Skin I Live In’ (English subtitles) on Tuesday next, April 17 at 8pm. Admission costs €5.